A recent graphic-style layout in the New York Times shows the breakdown of the 81 daily deaths by firearms within the United States of America: murder, suicide, accident, male, female, black, white, age group. Doubtless many will view such a picture with gun control in mind. Unsurprisingly, I approach it thinking of gender issues. And I note how overwhelmingly more likely the men are to take their own lives than the women. In fact, male suicides are far and away the largest group. I am reminded of one of MIsForMalevolent's posts where he calculates from a total of 22,500 male suicides per year nearly 15,000 result from divorce and separation. I observed that this is approximately one suicide of an ex father and husband for every sitcom you watch, if you watch them all day and all night, all year. The total number of women killing themselves each year is about the same as the number of men doing so who are not motivated by the failure of a marriage.
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1 comment:
That suicide rate connection to divorce is no scary stat. It is not much of a stretch at all to conclude that the terrible gender bias is the major contributing factor.
So a fair, more civil, process would actually save lives. Wow. Still not likely to get legislators off their fat lazy cans to fix any of this.
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